Highlights
Innovations create unique products, and thus growth. Competitive advantages are therefore increasingly less due to cost advantages and more to new, rule-breaking ideas with which companies can fill their customers with enthusiasm and offer true added value.
In order to be successful, a company not only has to be the first to recognise customer needs, but it also needs to translate them into and consistently implement them in product, service and marketing innovations. The Internet is increasingly the key to this.
Since the company was founded ten years ago, SinnerSchrader has supported start-ups and top 500 companies in establishing innovative ideas on the market by providing them with digital communications and transaction platforms. The result is a continuous series of innovation stories, implemented consistently.
When SinnerSchrader started out in 1996, fewer than four million people in Germany used the Internet, it was not yet possible to book trips online, broadband connections were just a dream, the phrase “to google” didn’t mean anything and Amazon celebrated its first birthday with annual revenues of around USD 15 million.
Today, in 2006, nearly 39 million people in Germany are online, 13 million of them book trips over the Internet and just as many have a broadband Internet connection, the 24th edition of the Duden, the standard German dictionary, includes “to google” as a term for searching the Internet, and Amazon has become the world’s largest online retailer, with anticipated annual revenues of over USD 10 billion.
In the past ten years, numerous large and small innovations have made the Internet a permanent part of the everyday lives of many people. And in these ten years, SinnerSchrader has shaped the development of the Internet in Germany in its
role as a partner to start-ups and established companies alike.
Development of revenues according to quarters in € 000s
At the start of the new 2006/2007 financial year, the general data for SinnerSchrader’s business development continues to be positive. The importance of the Internet for shaping relations between companies and customers will continue to increase. The triumphal progress of search engine marketing, which started in 2005, and the current trend towards greater interaction among and with users/customers of Internet systems, linked to the buzzword “Web 2.0”, document the dynamism with which Internet business is developing. According to the annual Technology Fast 500 survey conducted by Deloitte, in 2006 American CEOs continued to believe that the “Internet/IP” industry segment would be the segment with the strongest growth in the three years ahead. With an overall positive expectation of economic development in Germany, for which the burden caused by the imminent rise in VAT seems to be growing less important, SinnerSchrader is expecting double-digit growth rates in the market for interactive services in Germany.
Due to the positive overall environment, its market position as one of the five biggest
Internet service providers in Germany and the current orders on hand, SinnerSchrader expects organic revenue growth of 15 % to over € 18 million in the 2006/2007 financial year.
Now that the last legacy of the boom phase of 1999/2000 has been removed following the move into new office space in Hamburg in July 2006, in the 2006/2007 financial year SinnerSchrader will come much closer to its medium-term goal of an operating margin of between 10 % and 12 %. According to the current forecast, the operating result (EBITA) will double over that achieved in the 2005/2006 financial year and will be on the order of
€ 1.2 million.
All business segments will contribute to the planned rise in revenue and income. After strong growth rates in the Interactive Services segment in the 2004/2005 and 2005/2006 financial years, the dynamism in the Interactive Software and Interactive Marketing segments should increase in 2006/2007.
Since the advantages of offsetting losses against tax already had to be taken into account in the 2005/2006 statement of operations, the operating development will only be reflected in the net income to a limited extent.
For 2007/2008 SinnerSchrader expects to be able to continue with double-digit growth and to increase the EBITA disproportionately.
Furthermore, it remains the goal of SinnerSchrader to expand its service portfolio by means of acquisitions and to develop further potential for growth and results.
